


Before you know it, it'll be over and we will be back to just us.  I promise.

by Justanothershortstory_sofar



Series: The DeRolo Seven [4]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion, Con Artists, F/F, F/M, Heist, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Percy is hungover a lot of the time, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-23
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-07-15 22:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16073090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Justanothershortstory_sofar/pseuds/Justanothershortstory_sofar
Summary: Vox Machina, after pulling off a successful heist, are double-crossed and left for dead.  With their identities burned, they need outside help to take down the man who scammed them.  That is, if their new ally doesn't scam and leave them in the wind.Part 3 of the De Rolo 7 AU (Leverage Crossover)





	Before you know it, it'll be over and we will be back to just us.  I promise.

**Author's Note:**

> It's back! I spent a while rewriting and editing this because I was not super happy with it, but this is the most I want to edit because I'm lazy by nature.

Percy

“Percival,”  Vex’s voice floats through his unconscious mind.  “Percy. Get up, darling.”

He groans, rubbing his pounding head.  

“What’s going on?”  He murmurs. 

“Your plan exploded on us, that’s what’s up.”  Vax’s voice chimed in. “Now get up, and get us un-fucked.”

* * *

 

12 Hours Earlier

“Mister Hotis, I presume?”  Percy smiled warmly, greeting the cautious man holding onto a notebook with a death grip.  

“Mister Kowalski?”  He smiles, nervous. Hotis takes a seat across from Percy and Vex, taking long and slow deep breaths.  

“How can we help you?”  Vex slides him a glass of water.  “Your email was fairly vague, I’m afraid we need a little more information.”  

“Okay.”  He takes a sip of water.  “I’ve been screwed. Do you know anything about airplane designs?”

“Give me one of those little pencils and a ruler, I’d give it a shot.”  Percy smiles. 

“I work for V.C. Avionics, going on fifteen years now.  We were just about to announce a new hybrid jetliner, would have cut our costs and nearly doubled our profits.  But we were robbed, Mr. Kowalski. Pearson, our rival, stole our plans. They’re going to unveil them this Friday, and we’ll be out six years of R&D- I’ll be fired, at best.”

“Alright.”  Percy nods then looks to Vex.  “We will get them back before they have a chance to go public.”

“But how?”  Hotis shakes his head.  “Our lawyers say we have no way of getting them back, not legally…”

“Trust us.”  Vex pats his hand.  “We’ll get them back for you.” 

  
  


Vex

“So.  We go fast, get the plans, leave.”  Percy gestures at a digital blueprint of the Pearson building.  “Small team this time: Vax on infiltration, Keyleth to get the files, Grog for protection, I’ll be on the building across the street and run ops from there.”  

“Sweet.”  Keyleth smiles.   “I’ll see you guys tonight.”

“Are you sure you don’t want a grifter on your team?”  Vex asks. 

“We’ll be quicker without cons.”  Softer, he adds, “And I think your brother would vastly appreciate it if you stayed out of danger for a little while, I think.”

“I don’t much care for what he thinks.”  Vex’s mind goes back to their last job, with Vax wanting to pull away so badly and her almost getting hurt and why she keeps staying.  

“I do, Vex.”  He squeezes her arm gently.  “I’d rather avoid situations where you wind up holding a bomb.”

“Right, okay.”  Vex pulls away. “See you tomorrow then.  Pike, got any plans for tonight?”

“It’s my night off, I thought I was infiltrating an avionics company, but Percy has that under control,”  Pike smiles. “So now I think I might get wasted. Wanna join.”

“Sure do,”  Vex picks up her handbag from the sofa.  “Lead the way to the bar, darling.”

 

Vax

“Coms check, count off.”  Percy was barely visible across the street, peering out at them on the roof of Pearson from an abandoned building.  

“One,”  Grog cracked his knuckles.  

“Two,” Keyleth adjusted the bag containing her laptop and feet of computer cables.  

“Three,”  Vax tugs on his harness straps, a few last security checks.  

“I copy.  Go on my count of three, Vax.”  Percy comes crackling through the com again.  “One–”

Vax didn’t hear past one, as he ran across the roof of the building and jumped over the edge, gracefully coming to a stop outside their target office.  

“No cutting, Vax.”  Percy sounds annoyed, almost.  So Vax was close to his goal, clearly.  “Vibration sensors are on, use the binary.”  

Percy was right on that, at least.  Vax placed his round grip against the pane, then traced a hole in the thick glass large enough for him to pull through.  

“Not gonna lie, I’m proud of that binary,”  Keyleth lightens the mood. Vax returns the binary, warm from melting through the glass or something, he wasn’t sure what it did exactly, back into his bag.  “How’s it working for you, Vax?”

“Give me a minute.”  Vax exhales. The glass lifts out of place, and he drops it to the ground.  Contorting himself ever smaller, he slips through the hole, unfastening himself from the harness, tumbling onto the desk with a graceful flip.  

“I’m in.  Deactivating alarms now.”  Vax uses Keyleth’s program to get into the desktop computer.  “I have security feed, Percy, do you have a clear video.”

“I have it,”  Percy says in his ear.  “Keyleth, Grog, you in position?”

“Copy,”  Keyleth comes in.  

“Send them down, Vax.”

With a key swipe that makes him feel like Keyleth, the elevator begins to drop with a shudder, bringing Kiki and Grog to the server room.  

 

Grog

It’s a bit of a startle when the elevator starts to descend.  Keyleth almost falls, catching herself on the bare walls of the elevator shaft.  Grog helps her back up, making himself a little smaller to give her more space in the small elevator floor.  

“Twentieth floor, here we go.”  Keyleth jimmies the doors open, and sticks her head out, looking at both ends of the hallway.     
“You go to the server, I’ll be keeping watch.”  Grog brushes past her, assessing the area. “Got no time to waste.  Vax, you have an eye on all the guards?”

“Yeah, I see all… eight?”  Vax pauses. “It’s hard to tell.”

Keyleth slides a dummy key card into a reader by the server door and watches as code begins to cycle.  

“Eight digit numeric passcode,”  She sounds almost impressed. “I salute you, sir.”

“Grog, you have guards coming your way,”  Percy warns. “There’s only five in the security room.  Two approaching, maybe three minutes.”

“What?”  Vax clicks around.  “How did you..? Why are they moving early?”

“Haircuts, Vax,”  Percy replies. “Count the haircuts.”

“Nevertheless, why are they doing their rounds an hour early?”

“NBA playoffs tonight.”  Grog mentions. “They’re going early to watch the game.  Or, I don’t know, something. I don’t think the why matters.  Keyleth, stay here. I need bait.”

He strides away, vanishing around a corner before Keyleth can turn around.  

“Grog?  What do you mean by bait?  GROG!” She turns back to her laptop, hitting it lightly.  “Come on, baby. Come on come on come on… fuck it.”

Keyleth sets down the laptop and begins to run just as the guards turn a corner.   This was going to be fun. 

“Freeze!”  the guards raise their guns.  “Radio the control room.”

Keyleth lifts her arms, dropping the heavy duffel bag to the ground. 

Grog swoops from behind, taking out one of the guards with a solid hit to the head, then a sweep of his powerful leg felled the second.  Carefully, he picked up both guns from the floor, removing the clips with a single forceful shake. 

The bag falls to the ground with a thud. 

“Never liked guns, really. Go on then, let’s get those files.”

Keyleth grinned, returning to the door.  Now, the code was determined, and the metal door unlocked with a satisfying click.  

“Open sesame.”   Keyleth began to unwind the cables from her bag, hooking them into servers and a monitor and her own laptop.  “I only need a few more minutes, are we clear on the guard front?”

“All clear, but I lost elevators.”  Vax comes through. “They did some sort of hard reset, and I can’t get them back.”

“God, I have to do everything myself, don’t I?”  Keyleth groans. Her fingers weave around her keyboard, identifying and pulling the blueprints from the server.  “Percy, Vax, figure something out. And for the love of Sarenrae, do it without squabbling, please.”

“I have a plan.”  Percy closes out his station, shutting laptops and moving down the stairs of the abandoned building he’s residing in.  “Make your way to the elevator when you’re done, we’re going to the burn scam.”

“Sweet.”  Grog smiles.  “Vax, can you come down to this floor?”  

“On my way now.”  

“I’m done here,”  Keyleth hits a final key, and Grog watches as the low blue lights of the server room glow with a discordant motion, some of them red.   Keyleth laughs. “Let chaos reign.”

“Uploaded a virus?”  Grog smiles. 

“Oh, who said I only gave them one virus?”  Keyleth winks. “Age of the geek, baby.”

“Focus.”  Vax pops up out of nowhere, soft footsteps unnoticed by the other two.  He holds up a crutch. “Who’s the burn victim?”

Keyleth and Grog look at each other, then to Vax.  

“You gotta be kidding me.”  He presses the elevator button.  “Fine. Just this once.” 

The trio drops their bags into the elevator, pulling office clothing and prosthetic burn skin and an impressive number of casts, all of which find their way onto Vax.  

The elevator opens on the ground floor, and the three shuffle out, Keyleth and Grog supporting a coughing and groaning Vax.  

“What the,”  One of the security guards looks up from the basketball game.  “What are you doing here?”

“Yeah, keep staring, real classy.”  Keyleth snaps at him.

“Coralin, it’s fine.”  Vax sniffles. “I know what I look like.”  

“Get the door, why don’t you?” Grog barks at the guards.  “You people are the worst.”

The guards, flustered, open the door for them.  Vax continues to shuffle, Keyleth’s arm out and supporting his.  

“Have a nice-”  Grog shuts the door in the face of the guard. 

“Let’s go,”  Percy rolls down the window of his sedan, parked in front.  “Get in.”

“That was a nice scam!”  Grog smiles, leaning his seat back.  “Easier to have them open the door for us. I did want to punch some of them.”

“Sure is.”  Keyleth closes her laptop.  “Even better, I just sent Hotis the plans.  Cash should be in our account in a few hours.”

“I wonder how Pike and Vex are getting on,”  Percy lets himself smile. “Shall we join them, do you think?”

 

Percy

He was awoken with a splitting hangover and his phone ringing impossibly loudly.  

“Hello?”  

“You screwed me!”  Hotis hisses. “You sonofabitch, I will end you.”

“What are you talking about?”  Percy checks the time- almost eight in the morning.  

“I never got the plans.  I froze the payments before you scam artists got to con me out of my money.”  Hotis’ voice raises to a shout, just high enough to make Percy’s head ring. “The meeting is in less than two hours, I need to have something by then.”

“Okay, clearly we can make this work.”  Percy tries to think. “We can meet, I’ll bring the plans to the office-”

“No, not here!”  Hotis pauses. “There’s an abandoned airplane hanger maybe twenty minutes out of town.  I’ll meet you there in an hour, and you’ll bring the plans. AND your team. I want to look at whichever one of them scammed me in the eyes.  Then you get paid.”

Hotis hangs up, and Percy flops back onto his rickety bed.  

“Guys?”  He wanders out, finding his team in a state of drunken disrepair.  Last night was coming back to him in flashes- how drunk Vex was when they caught up, Vax doing shots to catch up, Grog and Pike in a beer chugging competition, Keyleth getting hammered after a single shot of amaretto.  

Now, they were sprawled around the apartment.  The twins were sleeping on top of each other, hair in big bedhead messes.  Grog was sprawled across the kitchen tile, Pike passed out in the shower, her small frame curled into a ball at the bottom.  Keyleth was… awake? And functional, it seems, frying a mountain of eggs and brewing a pot of coffee. 

“Morning, sleepyhead!”  She smiled. 

Percy began to reach for the coffee pot, groaning slightly.  Keyleth was quicker and smacked his hand away before he got a chance to drink directly from the pot.  

“Nope.  You’re drinking this first.”  She handed him a chipped glass full of a murky brown liquid.  “Family hangover cure.”

Percy takes a sip, then has to fight the urge to vomit into his sink.  

“Why is it fizzy?  And it tastes like beef, but sweet?”

“Pickle juice, beef ramen flavor packets, sriracha, and a raw egg.”  Keyleth is drinking coffee, which is massively unfair. “Oh, and alka-seltzer in there too.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”  

“Hey, am I hungover?”  She cocks an eyebrow.

“You had one drink.”  Percy takes another sip.  “If amaretto can even be called a drink.”

“First off, yes.”  Keyleth slides another egg off of the pan, turning off the heat.  “Second, I know my limits, so I pre-dosed last night. I swear it works.”

Percy takes a moment to weigh his choices.  This probably won't make anything worse, and it isn’t absolutely awful.  He drinks it fully, even the little bits of salt and beef seasoning that didn’t quite dissolve.  

“Thought your family was fairly hippie,” He murmurs into a cup of coffee Keyleth now gives him.  “Or Vegan, at the very least.”

“We are, kinda.  Then we get drunk.  Beef ramen doesn’t even have much beef.  What was that call?” 

“Hotis says we screwed him.  The team has to be at an airplane hangar in an hour.”  Percy looks, squinting at Keyleth. “You did send him those plans, right?”

“Of course I did!”  She smacks him again, this time with the flat of her spatula.  “I’ll wake them up, you eat.”

 

Pike

It had been a long time since she had a night like that, chugging beers with Grog like she was still in college.  Now, she remembers why she quit, slurping iced coffee through a straw and keeping her eyes almost closed behind sunglasses.  

Hotis had a good sense of style in regards to meeting places.  The hangar was dark, dismal, wet, and cold. 

“Why did he need to meet with everyone?”  Vex grumbles. “This is bullshit.”

“Do you want to get paid?”  Percy looks around. 

“Here’s what I don’t get.”  Keyleth seems fine, which is almost an affront.  Most of them got her family hangover cure down, with varying degrees of success.  “Why did he say we didn’t send it? I watched it go out, babysat my computer for the entire time.  There’s no reason why he wouldn’t have it.”

“Unless…”  Percy pauses.  “Everybody out.”

“What?”  Pike doesn’t follow.  

“EVERYONE OUT,”  Percy yells, sprinting for the doors.  

With every pounding step, her brain feels like it’s going to snap off and float away, but still, Pike runs.  

Panting, the team takes a moment to collect themselves.  

“What was that for, Percival?”  Vax coughs. 

“Fairly anticlimactic, I have to say,”  Vex chimes in. 

“Huh,”  Percy looks back, just as the warehouse explodes, peals of fire licking the window panes, the force pushing them to the ground as shards of glass spray over them.  

“Oh fuck.”  Pike thought as she drifted away into blissful sleep.  

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you liked this, you might also like my Tumblr, where I post previews of my writing, status updates on fics, gifs from Leverage, and my favorite Critical Role moments. Find me there @zoetriestobecoolbutnope.


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